This is the 2nd part of my 3 part story about ‘dj’ ing with a netbook’. Actually it’s the 3rd part in a 4 part series, but who cares it’s just numbers, right? In the article i wrote earlier this week, which you can find here(Dutch), i told you about why i bought the model i bought and my first tests with Windows 7.
Starting this project i had high hopes. Needless to say i lowered my expectations after the Windows debacle. But luckily my friends from the excellent msi fanpage insanelywind where there to brighten up my day with promises of much better overall performance running OSX.
While this doesn’t say anything about how Traktor would run under OSX, since netbooks as the name suggests are mainly used for browsing, it gave me a glimmer of hope that there was a chance that it would work out fine.
Well i can describe the installation process for you, but that would be a long boring story. If you’re interested in installing OSX on your PC or netbook there are quite a few how to’s on the web. Although i would strongly advice you not to do it if you don’t have any knowledge of how to work in a command line interface. Not that you need any knowledge for the installation, but if anything goes wrong, which will inevitably happen, you’ll need to work with OSX’s Terminal. So either know how to work with terminal or let somebody, who has the knowledge, do the installation for you. And if you need any help don’t hesitate to ask me for some advice.
After some tweaking i got my system up and running and it was time to install Traktor. Finalizing installations on a netbook running OSX seemed to be taking longer than usual but besides that small problem everything went great.
Booting Traktor i immediately noticed the same problems as on the Windows system, which was to be expected since the resolution nor the program’s lay out changes when switching from Windows to OSX.
Analyzing tracks was a tad bit faster, still not up to speed with a normal computer but good enough to get the analyzing done before your track ends. While playing 4 decks at a time without any effects the processor doesn’t go over 15% of it’s resources, and the sound quality seems decent enough to gig with it(Note: i’ll have to test this on a good sound system before saying anything conclusive). When running 2 effects on all decks the processor uses nearly all of it’s resources, but the sound doesn’t glitch or anything like that. When running chained effects(3 effects at once for all you traktor noobs, but i doubt you came this far, if you did kudos), even on 2 decks, the processor immediately spikes and the sound starts to glitch heavily.
Besides those minor issues traktor seems to be running smooth. I’ve played for over 4 hours twice, mixing on 2 decks, without any problems. In the next couple of weeks i’ll be testing the system extensively to see if it’s really possible to play with this setup in a club. Right now i would say yes, but the system still has to prove it’s self stable enough over the long haul. and stability really is the only thing a dj needs in a club environment. I’ll report back to you guys in a couple of weeks, and for the people who’ll be at our next night in AIR if you see me play with a netbook it worked out fine. See you there! Cheerio, Pennypacker
Great article Dylan! I still hope you’ll play with your macbook in AIR, just to be sure…